Analogous to a load balancer routing HTTP traffic, the Oracle Mediator routes data from service providers to external partners. In addition, it can subscribe to and publish business events.

Using Oracle Mediator, you create routing services and rules for them. A routing service is the key component for moving a message across the enterprise service bus – from its entry point to its exit point. The rules determine how a message instance processed by the routing service gets to its next destination. Using the rules, Oracle Mediator can perform the following actions:

Route: Determines the service component (BPEL process, business rule, human task, and mediator) to which to send the messages.

Validate: Provides
support for validating the incoming message payload by using a schematron or an XSD file.

Filter: If specified in the rules, applies a filter expression that specifies the contents (payload) of a message be analyzed before any service is invoked.

Transformation: If specified in the rules, transforms document data from one XML schema to another, thus enabling data interchange among applications using different schemas.

During runtime, Oracle Mediator evaluates routing rules, performs transformations, applies optional time delays, and either invokes another service or raises another business event. A routing service can handle returned responses, callbacks, faults, and time-outs. Oracle Mediator can also be used to implement a variety of integration patterns, such as service virtualization, service aggregation, publish and subscribe, fan-in, and fan-out.

About Oracle Service Bus with Oracle Mediator

Oracle Service Bus provides standalone service bus capabilities, enabling separation between application developers and target systems or services. The main users of the Oracle Service Bus are integration developers and operations personnel. Their mission is to shield application developers from changes in the endpoint services or systems and to prevent those systems from being overloaded with requests from upstream applications.

Whereas Oracle Service Bus provides service virtualization and protocol transformations for an Oracle SOA Suite application containing multiple composites, Oracle Mediator is an intra-composite mediation component that is deployed within an application.